Plenty of punches are thrown in the forceful new revival of Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” that opened on Thursday night at the Belasco Theater. Eyes are blackened, uppercuts fly back and forth, and by the end of the play, the young boxer hero, Joe Bonaparte (Seth Numrich), is staggering across the stage, delirious and practically bathed in blood.

But the blows that truly stun are the ones we cannot literally see, the jabs to the soul that Joe inflicts on himself, torn as he is between the urge to make it big as a boxer and the desire to be the artist he feels he was meant to be.

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Golden Boy Seth Numrich, left, and Danny Burstein in this Clifford Odets play at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Throughout this blistering Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher and featuring a superb cast of almost 20 actors — a rare feast on Broadway these days — we watch in anguished anticipation as Joe struggles with a defining question..

Do you spend your life trying to shine in a world that values only the mighty dollar and the power it brings, or seek instead to fulfill a humbler, more humane destiny? “Truthful success,” as Joe’s Old World Italian father puts it, remains as elusive a goal today as it did when “Golden Boy” first opened on Broadway at the same theater 75 years ago.

The question was hardly academic for Odets, whose early successes for the Group Theater (“Waiting for Lefty,” “Awake and Sing!”) were marked by a fiery, left-leaning idealism. By the time he wrote “Golden Boy,” Odets had tasted popular acclaim and its honeyed fruits: a lucrative visit to Hollywood and a glamorous marriage to the movie queen Luise Rainer. He found the flavor to his liking.

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Tony Shalhoub, left, and Seth Numrich in “Golden Boy.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Although “Golden Boy” charts the story of a young man who must choose between a career as a violinist, for which he has been training since childhood, and boxing, which he has impulsively taken up as a quicker route to the big time, Odets was spilling his own blood onto the page, too. He sometimes disdained the play as being written expressly to achieve a commercial hit — by 1937 the Group Theater’s fortunes were in question — but his discomfort may also have arisen from the knowledge that he was writing a parable of his own conflicted life. In its most powerful scenes the play has a tortured, keening quality that cuts sharply through the sometimes formulaic story line.

Mr. Sher directed a similarly galvanizing production of “Awake and Sing!” for Lincoln Center Theater several years ago. The skills he evinced in that rewarding revival are on view here, too: a knack for making Odets’s vernacular language feel like fresh mint instead of stale corn, and a gift for cutting to the emotional quick of a conventionally structured melodrama.

As the young hero, who is determined to make himself over into the kind of man the world reveres, Mr. Numrich (“War Horse”) moves with an antic grace in the play’s early scenes, bopping around the stage with animal spirits as he seeks to charm the manager Tom Moody (a fine Danny Mastrogiorgio) into giving him a chance in the ring. There is music in the way Mr. Numrich moves that hints at the lyric temperament Joe once felt as a salvation (“With music I’m never alone when I’m alone”), and now feels as an inhibiting burden.

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Tony Shalhoub and Yvonne Strahovski in "Golden Boy."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In the play’s most quietly captivating scene, Joe opens his heart to Moody’s girlfriend, Lorna (Yvonne Strahovski), on whom he has quickly developed an overwhelming crush, revealing the sensitivity that has kept him from being true to himself.

“People have hurt my feelings for years,” he says. “I never forget. You can’t get even with people by playing the fiddle. If music shot bullets, I’d like it better — artists and people like that are freaks today. The world moves fast, and they sit around like forgotten dopes.”

But as Joe throws himself into the brutalizing fight world, it is he who seems to be slowing down. Mr. Numrich’s Joe is slowly drained of the buoyant spirits that gave him a captivating glow early in the play. Conflicted and disillusioned, he becomes a machine preserving his energies for the ring, with little spirit left over for living his life.

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A scene from "Golden Boy" at the Belasco Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The process is watched from a distance by his loving father, played with impressive delicacy by a sad-eyed, soft-spoken Tony Shalhoub. Handily surmounting the burden of dialogue written in hokey Italian-American-ese (“I feela good, like-a to have some music. Hey, where’s-a my boy, Joe?”), Mr. Shalhoub infuses his performance with an elegiac tenderness that never descends into the maudlin. The crucial scene in which Joe implores his father to give him his blessing on his new career — and is refused — is played with an unforced emotional rigor that makes it all the more moving.

The icily beautiful Ms. Strahovski, making a striking Broadway debut, brings out the velvety heart beating under Lorna’s cool, hardened-steel exterior. Slinging Lorna’s tart wisecracks with the expertise of a 1930s B-movie star, she also manages to turn her borderline stereotypical character into a rounded human being who is almost as tortured by Joe’s plight as he is.

The rest of the large cast fills out the play’s smoky fight-world ambience impressively, no doubt aided by the atmospheric sets by Michael Yeargan, the sharply cut period duds by Catherine Zuber and the starkly dramatic lighting by Donald Holder, all working at the top of their games.

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Excerpt: 'Golden Boy'

Seth Numrich, Tony Shalhoub and Danny Burstein in a scene from Lincoln Center Theater's revival of the Clifford Odets play.

“Golden Boy” is at times dragged down by predictable plot mechanics that obscure the ripped-from-the-gut honesty that glittered more fiercely in earlier Odets plays. Some passages are too bluntly written, tapping out the play’s moral message in telegraphic language that makes you wince.

“Lorna, I see what I did,” Joe cries out in the climactic scene, after a tragic accident in the ring. “I murdered myself, too!”

But even the play’s pulpier excesses (the vaguely homosexual investor Eddie Fuseli, played by an oily Anthony Crivello) are brought home with conviction by the cast. And Mr. Sher effectively spotlights the play’s emotional center in Joe’s agonizing fluctuations between pride and shame, tenderness and rage.

Exulting after his comeback in the play’s climactic fight, Joe crows: “How do you like me, boys? Am I good or am I good?” The last question doesn’t really have the joyous sound of arrogant rhetoric: the poor kid has been searching his soul for the answer since the play began, and he still hasn’t found it.

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